Currently, a number of consumer electronic devices are adapted to receive speech via microphone ports or headsets. While the typical example is a portable telecommunications device (mobile telephone), with the advent of Voice over IP (VoIP), desktop computers, laptop computers and tablet computers may also be used to perform voice communications.
When using these electronic devices, the user also has the option of using the speakerphone mode or a wired headset to receive his speech. However, a common complaint with these hands-free modes of operation is that the speech captured by the microphone port or the headset includes environmental noise such as secondary speakers in the background or other background noises. This environmental noise often renders the user's speech unintelligible and thus, degrades the quality of the voice communication.
Mobile phones enable their users to conduct conversations in many different acoustic environments. Some of these are relatively quiet while others are quite noisy. There may be high background or ambient noise levels, for instance, on a busy street or near an airport or train station. To improve intelligibility of the speech of the near-end user as heard by the far-end user, an audio signal processing technique known as ambient noise suppression can be implemented in the mobile phone. During a mobile phone call, the ambient noise suppressor operates upon an uplink signal that contains speech of the near-end user and that is transmitted by the mobile phone to the far-end user's device during the call, to clean up or reduce the amount of the background noise that has been picked up by the primary or talker microphone of the mobile phone. There are various known techniques for implementing the ambient noise suppressor. For example, using a second microphone that is positioned and oriented to pickup primarily the ambient sound, rather than the near-end user's speech, the ambient sound signal is electronically subtracted or suppressed from the talker signal and the result becomes the uplink. This noise reduction technique using two microphones has an advantage over the noise reduction technique using a single microphone because it can perform a better separation between the user's speech and the ambient noises and thus is better capable of attenuating the ambient noises. However, when the two microphones are placed on a headset or phone held close to user's head, at the ear, the captured speech signal by the two microphones may be negatively affected by the physical aspects of the user's body (e.g., the head, pinnae, shoulders, chest, hair, etc.) and/or other phenomena including reflection, diffusion, scattering, and absorption.